Growing Antibiotic Shortages Threaten Patient Care

April 25, 2015 2:15 PM

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Of particular concern, as study author Larissa May, MD, of George Washington University notes, “We found a tremendous number of drugs that are used to treat life threatening infections that just were not available.” Almost half—46%–of the shortages involved antibiotics needed for difficult-to-treat resistant organisms like carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and C. difficile.

Drug shortages are defined by the FDA as “a situation in which the total supply of all clinically interchangeable versions of an FDA-regulated drug product is inadequate to meet the projected demand at the user level.”